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Jay-Z "In My Lifetime" (1995)

Ski: "I met Jay [in the] early ’90s [when] we were shooting a video for Original Flavor's 'Here We Go.' Clark Kent brought him, Sauce Money, and Jaz-O. He brought him to the video shoot to see if Dame was interested in managing him at the time. They all spit and we was like, 'We definitely need these kids down with us.' Once they signed up, me and Jay started recording and getting to know each other. Jay made me stop rapping. He made me say, 'I just need to be producing this dude.' He’s the rapper I want to be and I know I can’t be...that’s a lot of effort. [Laughs.] I’d rather just put my energy into making some tracks.

"Soon as I met him, we started recording. We put him on one of our singles, 'Can I Get Open' with the video. And that set everything up; we did a mini-tour, and once we got off tour we just started recording. He came to the crib and that's when 'In My Lifetime' and Reasonable Doubt started coming out. Jay was in my crib, me just making beats. It was all dirty, dusty, crappy sounding. We just did it raw. Straight off the SP, he just came in and laid it down, went to D&D the next day, dressed it up, and shot a video. That’s not my first song with Jay, but that’s one of the first songs that actually got put out.

"I didn't really get paid for that one. It didn’t matter at the time. It was like, 'Yo, this is dope. I love it.' I wasn't even thinking about money. It was so crazy, when I first started producing I didn't even know you called it a 'producer.' I was so used to making beats for myself, I just thought everybody made their own beats and they rapped to it. And Clark Kent was like, 'Yo, you know you a producer right?' I'm like, 'What you mean?' He was like, 'You know you can take your tracks and sell them, right?' [Laughs.] Even if I didn’t get paid [for that], they definitely looked out for me on Reasonable Doubt."

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